Adam; This author makes no valid points. He simply takes shots at what he doesn't like to condemn a product wholly. The author criticizes the work of individual authors, and holds Flash to blame as an 'enabler'. This assertion is a non sequitur, and justifies my comment about the article being nothing but useless rubbish. People make Web sites, Web sites do not make themselves and Flash can certainly be used for better purposes.
Flash is ANYTHING but evil, and I would say your comments about navigation are invalid in the same way. Authors make movies accessible, navigable, etc., not Flash - if you want to talk aesthetics, you need to talk with the aesthetes, not the assembly programmers who have nothing to do with this at all whatsoever. That being said, I have an RIA project underway that I am planning to market as an RIA development platform and, without saying too much before the big release, it has no animation, no funny navigation, and nothing that would offend 'serious' application developer's sensible yearnings for the old blue and gray. There is so much more that can be done with Flash it dwarfs the animation aspects, and it is time for people's perceptions to change about the product. Useless prattling like this only makes me mad... M -----Original Message----- From: Adam Wayne Lehman [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 10:46 AM To: CF-Talk Subject: RE: Is Flash really THAT good? Well I'm feeling adventurous... I think all the points this author makes are valid. In fact it's something our industry should heed well. As developers when we leave the browser, it's easy to get carried away. Normally we have all these constraints like 'form controls' and 'underlined hyperlinks', components that are universal across the board. Our end users are extremely familiar with these items, so they can navigate anywhere in the web with moderate ease. Now when we move into RIA everything the user knows about navigation... is gone. The developers now take on much more responsibility and usability (which most developers ignore all together) becomes mission critical. I don't think anyone can disagree that there are a tremendous amount of _shitty_ flash sites out there as a result. But I don't want to fully defend the a-hole who wrote this article (if you can even call it that). His points are valid, but they do not equate to "Flash is Evil" or "Flash sucks". Splash pages _are_ useless, flaming logos are soooooo 1997, and doing an entire site in flash, just for the sake of doing it is retarded. But just because there is a lot of crap built with the tools, doesn't mean the technology is evil. It's quite the opposite. The technology is so great, and so easy to use... that any shmuck can do it. (We run into this same issue with CF, it leads to bad programming tendencies, because it's so easy to use.) Now let's turn the tables here. Is this guy color blind, is the theme a tribute the short bus he rode to school in? Further more he doesn't even have a single image on his page, just text. (Is he Amish or something?) Additionally all his article are like 250px wide so every page is like 4 screens vertical. The right justified nav bar serves only one purpose.... to create dead space. I think considering his site, the author is discredited and possibly just jealous of designers in general. You know what pisses me off more than splash pages and pointless animations? The fact that any shmuck with notepad can have a web site. Adam Wayne Lehman Web Systems Developer Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Distance Education Division ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?forumid=4 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/index.cfm?method=subscribe&forumid=4 FAQ: http://www.thenetprofits.co.uk/coldfusion/faq This list and all House of Fusion resources hosted by CFHosting.com. The place for dependable ColdFusion Hosting. http://www.cfhosting.com Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=89.70.4
